JOE DILEONARDO
JOLLY RANCHER

How did Jolly Rancher transform itself from a sweet candy for grandma's candy bowl to a hip teen treat?

It's all in the packaging and marketing, says Joe DiLeonardo, Leaf North America's marketing director of non-chocolate business.

Jolly Rancher fruit-flavored, hard-candy sticks have long been a favorite of kids, while mothers and grandmothers preferred the bags of individually wrapped bite-size pieces for candy bowls and purses. But that left out a key market: teens and young adults.

So Leaf molded its product into 3/4-inch squares and packaged them into assorted-flavor roll packs. Hip new TV commercials, themed "The great taste of fruit squared," broke from N W Ayer, Chicago.

By last year, sales of Jolly Rancher package and roll candies in supermarkets, drugstores and mass merchandiserswere up 24% to $60.1 million over the year before, according to Information Resources Inc.